Towards a Philosophy of Illness: Encountering Moses Maimonides in Córdob-
Córdoba - view from the old Roman Bridge with the Tower of Calahorra in the foreground
While visiting Córdoba a few years ago, I found myself wandering through the Jewish District of the ancient Andalusian city. There in the dry and relentless heat, under a desert sky of immense, cloudless blue, I found the noble, bronzed monument dedicated to Moseh ben Maimon - better known in the West as Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) .
The figure in bronze sat placid, pensive, book in his robed lap. I snapped a few photos and felt in that undiminished heat, I’d come full circle in finding this statue.
Life and Legacy
During my raw and sometimes ravaging years of recovery, overcoming and healing, I’d read about the renowned and influential Arabic philosopher, born in Al-Andalus in what was then the golden age of Jewish culture in Moorish Spain. This was the more tranquil reign of the Almorovids. However, with the tyrannical rise and control of the Almohads, a Berber dynasty, many Christian and Jewish families abandoned their homes in Iberia in fear of persecution and possibly death. In contrast to their ruling predecessors, the Almohads were less tolerant of other religions and for many non-Muslims it was a matter of conversion to Islam, exile or potential execution.
Maimonides, a man of profound thinking and influence, was affected by these years of upheaval. Like many of his Arabic-speaking Jewish and Christian contemporaries, he fled the country with his family, landing upon the nearby shores of North Africa, specifically Morocco then Fostat (Old Cairo) in Egypt. Following this exodus, Moses’ father died a year later in their newly- adopted land and Moses’ younger brother, David, a merchant and a man determined to make his success in the East, tragically drowned on a trip to the Indian Sea (today, Indian Ocean).
Following the death of his closest sibling, the great man suffered two years of depression along with other ailments such as boils on his body and rampant fever. His sorrow was devastating for both heart and soul. Maimonides regarded his brother as a saint and a good man. Even some eight years after his brother’s drowning, the philosopher still felt burdened by the heavy emotion of loss. But with his widow and daughter to take care of, Maimonides would manage to pull himself together. From bereavement to success, Moses became the personal physician to the Muslim, al-Fadil, vizier to the Sultan Saladin. Later, in 1193 after Saladin’s death, Maimonides was later appointed court physician to the sultan’s eldest son, Afdal Nur al-Din Ali (1169–1225).
Works and Words of Wisdom
“Your purpose...should always be to know...the whole that was intended to be known.”
Today Maimonides is famous for his writings on Talmudic law, his Guide for the Perplexed, written in Arabic and translated into Hebrew shortly after his death. It became an instant classic in Medieval Philosophy, inspiring Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Duns Scotus (1266–1308) and the mystic, Meister Eckhart (1260–1307).
Yet, considering his role as court physician, Maimonides also worked on several treatises on medicine and health based on his observations and own experiences. In fact, he wrote about such diverse topics as hemorrhoids and digestion, asthma, along with glossaries on drug names. In time, he would produce his great, yet lesser-known body of wisdom, Regimen of Health, a discourse on healthy living and the mind-body connection.
His interest in health was what drew me to the philosopher years ago. I had learned that Maimonides was ahead of his time and, in many ways, ahead of Western Medicine. Before Depak Chopra and Caroline Myss in the twentieth-century, it was this Jewish philosopher of the Talmud who suggested that the soul’s health had a deep impact on the body. He writes: “One must pay attention and constantly consider emotional activities….. In all these the physician should not give precedence to anything before improving the state of the psyche by removing all these (extreme) emotions.”
Considering the loss of his brother and the ill health he endured following news of David’s death, he spoke from experience. It was grief-induced depression due to the death of his brother in 1170 that inspired such wisdom. But as renowned psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung would later reflect, it is the sufferer that brings the greatest healing.
In his time, the philosopher and court physician wisely urged fellow colleagues and, in addition, future doctors to consider and acknowledge the patient’s emotional state and not just their bodily parts. Illness could be caused, he postulated, and exacerbated by what he called ‘moral unhealth’. He strongly believed religion and medicine were complementary and related disciplines. The link was absolutely viable in his mind. Moreover, he suggested a more holistic approach and that a healthy life was an awareness of not only the body but the environment and the spirit’s interaction with said environment. In fact, he treated the continuum of body, soul, spirit and environment as absolutely necessary in creating an equilibrium and maintaining health.
Confronting and embracing the philosophy
When I first read of Maimonides in 2005, I was still going through the emotional motions of healing. I had already been applying this idea of a continuum in practice, or aspects, slowly discovering that my own symptoms, namely the ulcerative colitis I was dealing with, was due in large part to an exacerbation of emotions, namely resentment and anger and to a large extent, self-anger or depression. Lack of compassion for myself was also a contributing factor.
Things would make more sense for me with a backward glance and assistance from therapists wise enough to help me locate my blind spots. Up to that point, I had focused primarily on the physical. Nothing else. From the time I was first diagnosed in 2002, I had no idea why the illness had evolved in my life, believing it to be due in part to a c.difficile bacteria infection I contracted in April of that year. I invested in multiple supplements and figure this would be the path to take. Soon after, I went off the maintenance medicine, and later, I experienced a second flare-up the following year. Doctors, both specialists and naturopaths, offered only physical remedies while dieticians attempted to steer my body towards equilibrium through strict and rather punitive diets. Then, after two weeks of sleepless agony at McMaster Hospital, I checked myself out, a discharge that was a great risk as the specialist on-call that morning said I would mostly likely be dead in two weeks.
In those early days of self-discovery, my only recourse was myself. Despite my attempts at health through diet and expensive supplements, I found nothing offered release from this emotional wasteland I was experiencing yet finding this state of affairs more difficult to ignore. Hence, the therapists and their guiding hands. Through them, and their support, I took time to reference myself, my own life, through the lens of ‘moral unhealth’ (to quote Maimonides), and while I started to see the past clearly, I needed to emotionally unpack the hindrances to healing - namely blocked painful memories - and learn about release and forgiveness. This I undertook through hypnotherapy and talking therapy. Many of the emotional blockages that helped create the illness stemmed from verbal and physical abuse at the young age of three by a YMCA worker to the repressed emotions during my parent’s separation to my inability to express anger regarding a betrayal in my family brought on by mishandled estate funds. It also had to do with learning to reassert myself as a human being and find confidence in expressing my emotions.
In gratitude
For Maimonides, the body and spirit are inseparable, to treat one without consideration of the other is unfeasible for “physical health and happiness entail proper attention to spirituality”.
I am grateful for the men and women who helped me weather my stormy path to healing. And today, I reflect on Córdoba, an experience of Andalusia I never thought was possible during the worst years of my life.
I firmly believe all those illnesses we term chronic and incurable are due to the exacerbation of untapped emotions, if not our own conflicting and confusing inability to detect our own ability to repress ourselves. So in a sense, there is this extreme of feeling, an intensity that is equally and dominantly thwarted by a lack of release and this was what I endured before I learned to express myself and ineluctably heal. The bridge to my overcoming came with this awareness and, many ways, the philosophies of Maimonides.
“We each decide whether to make ourselves learned or ignorant, compassionate or cruel, generous or miserly. No one forces us. No one decides for us, no one drags us along one path or the other. We are responsible for what we are”
